Al-Shami

Overview

Al-Shami (al-Shāmī) is the nisba to al-Shām. The lexicographers give two accounts of the name and the geographers relay both: that it is from shaʾm, the left hand, for the country lies on the left of one who faces the sunrise while al-Yaman lies on his right; and that it is from Sām son of Nūḥ, the sīn of the name turned to shīn. Neither account is settled, and the sources set them side by side.

What the geographers mean by it

This is the useful thing the name carries. Al-Shām in the classical books is a whole country, not a state: Yāqūt runs it from the Euphrates in the north to al-ʿArīsh at the edge of Egypt, and from the sea eastward to the desert, and he divides it into the ajnād — Filasṭīn, al-Urdunn, Dimashq, Ḥimṣ, Qinnasrīn — which are administrative districts of the early period and do not match any later map. So a family attributed to al-Shām is attributed to that whole country, and the modern state whose name resembles the word is one part of it. The nisba is far wider than the state, and older.

A name given from outside

A nisba to a region rather than a town is characteristically applied from beyond it: within al-Shām a man is distinguished by his city — al-Dimashqī, al-Ḥalabī — and only outside it is he usefully called al-Shāmī. Names of this kind therefore settle on families after a move, and are borne in Egypt, the Ḥijāz and Iraq. Note too that shāma, a mark on the skin, is a separate word, and that the sources use shaʾmī and shāmī of the northerly quarter and its wind, so the letters alone do not fix the sense.

Bearing the name

A toponymic family name records a place an ancestor was attributed to — born there, settled there, known by it — as the name was applied to him, not a lineage. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the place itself.